CARY, North Carolina, USA May 9, 2006— Leading open source systems and network management vendors Qlusters and Emu Software today announced the industry’s first Open Management Consortium (OMC). The Consortium will promote the benefits offered by open source and open standard technologies and will provide a forum for product development collaboration among open source IT management projects. The founding members of the OMC include Nagios (sponsored by Ayamon), NetDirector (sponsored by Emu Software), openQRM (sponsored by Qlusters), openSIMS (sponsored by Symbiot), the Webmin project and the Zenoss project (sponsored by Zenoss, Inc.).
“The Consortium is an innovative approach that will allow multiple open source providers to collaborate on systems management initiatives for servers running open source software stacks,” said Jean Bozman, an IDC analyst based in San Mateo, CA. “Small companies do not have the reach or the resources to provide a broad-based systems management solution, or framework, without collaboration. This Consortium provides a mechanism to aggregate open source systems management solutions–and to fit these management solutions together to address customers’ operational costs.”
The Consortium is comprised of leading open source projects that are developing and shaping the technologies used to manage IT infrastructure, particularly open source infrastructure such as that hosted on Linux. The initial committee members represent community leaders and firms that are central to open management technologies. Specific objectives of the Open Management Consortium include:
Create awareness of open source management tools in the market
Provide education and resources to help end users make informed decisions regarding open source
Establish conventions and standards that enable integration and interoperability
Enable collaboration and coordination on common development projects
Promote collaborative open source systems management solutions
The Consortium will work to drive open standards for systems management within the industry, assisting IT managers and system administrators to custom-create solutions to best serve their business needs. One of the first projects will involve developing protocols for managing common IT infrastructure components, including information about servers, storage devices, configurations, networks models, middleware, applications and other relevant data, to create a unified approach to systems management for open source vendors and projects. The Consortium’s agenda also includes designing several integration paths for exchanging data with proprietary systems.
“By uniting these projects, we are providing IT managers with an alternative choice to the monolithic approach traditionally found in systems management,” said William Hurley, chief technology officer at Qlusters. “The Open Management Consortium will spearhead the movement to open source open standards, leveling the playing field in systems management and providing equal opportunity for all to participate.”
Mark Hinkle, LinuxWorld editor in chief, vice president of strategy at Emu Software and co-founder of the Open Management Consortium, said, “Having the freedom to manage and monitor systems using the technologies you want and to have those systems interact is our long-term goal. The Open Management Consortium will start by providing a forum for collaboration among these vendors and projects.”
“Collaboration between different projects that occupy the same space is the next natural step in the evolution of open source and has the potential to radically alter the way we use open source tools,” added Ethan Galstad, founder of Nagios. “The commercial systems management space appears to be headed for a shakeup, with the open source projects participating in the Open Management Consortium leading the charge. I’m definitely excited that the Nagios project is part of this effort.”
Mike Erwin, founder and chief executive officer of Symbiot said, “I’m excited to see an organization like the Open Management Consortium through which security tools can be integrated with other systems monitoring, administrative and management systems to provide a cohesive vantage of an organization’s technology landscape.”
“The Open Management Consortium will provide a valuable service in bringing together the various open source systems management tools and ensuring compatibility among them,” commented Jamie Cameron, leader of the popular open source management project, Webmin.
Bill Karpovich, co-founder and chief executive officer of Zenoss, added, “There is growing movement towards open source management solutions because of the dramatic cost advantages and the flexibility that we offer. By working together, we’ll be able to bring these benefits to a larger audience much more quickly.”
Membership in the Open Management Consortium will be open to like-minded open source projects and companies looking to collaborate on complimentary open source and open standards-based solutions. Additional participants will be announced shortly.
About the Open Management Consortium
The Open Management Consortium was announced to help advance the promotion, adoption, development and integration of open source systems/network management software. The founding members of the Consortium are Ayamon, Emu Software, Qlusters, Symbiot, Webmin and Zenoss. For more information, please visit http://www.openmanagement.org.
About Qlusters, Inc.
Founded in 2001, Qlusters provides open source systems management software to automate the data center. openQRM significantly reduces annual management costs for the data center while helping increase server utilization and minimizing downtime for Fortune 1000 companies. Qlusters is partners with leading vendors including HP, IBM, Intel, and Red Hat. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California with offices in Israel and New York. For more information, please visit http://www.qlusters.com.
About Emu Software
Emu Software, Inc. is the maker of NetDirector, an extensible management framework that brings features such as rollback, policy-based administration, multi-server changes, and an ergonomic interface to open source systems. Emu Software is the corporate sponsor of the open source NetDirector project and offers support and service offerings around the open source tools. Emu Software strives to deliver the leading cross-platform, cross-distribution configuration management solution for open source services such as Apache, Bind, Sendmail, and many others. Emu Software is headquartered in Cary, N.C. For more information, please visit http://www.emusoftware.com.
Ayamon, LLC
Ayamon, LLC was founded in 2003 with the purpose of helping to expand awareness and adoption of Open Source software in businesses and organizations worldwide. We believe strongly in the power, flexibility, outstanding value, and societal benefits that Open Source software has to offer. For more information, please visit http://www.ayamon.com.
Symbiot, Inc.
Symbiot is a leading provider of intelligent security infrastructure management systems (iSIMS). As the pioneer in applying risk metrics to adaptive network security, Symbiot utilizes proprietary genetic algorithms to measure, manage and mitigate risk to your networked assets. Through Symbiot.NET, Symbiot’s customers benefit from adaptive profiles defined from industry groups, and other Symbiot customers for community centric security; a new approach to mitigating risk. For more information, please visit http://www.symbiot.com.
About Webmin
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any browser that supports tables and forms (and Java for the File Manager module), you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and so on. Webmin consists of a simple web server, and a number of CGI programs which directly update system files like /etc/inetd.conf and /etc/passwd. The web server and all CGI programs are written in Perl version 5, and use no non-standard Perl modules. http://webmin.com.
About Zenoss, Inc.
Based in Annapolis, Maryland, Zenoss, Inc. is a systems management software company that is lowering the cost and complexity of enterprise systems monitoring and management through the power of its innovative software and open source development. The Zenoss software product provides an integrated, highly automated enterprise monitoring solution and is available for download at http://www.zenoss.org.
Contact
Mark R. Hinkle
Vice President
Emu Software
pr@emusoftware.com
Phone: 877.848.6100 x7006
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Link: emusoftware.com
